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concert review: Oregon Symphony

Yes, I’m in Portland, and this concert in the large and old-fashionedly ornate (it doesn’t have restrooms, it has “lounges”) Schnitzer Concert Hall downtown turned out to be the perfect way to spend a rainy Sunday afternoon. Music Director David Danzmayr led his crackerjack orchestra through Anna Clyne’s Color Field, a typically imaginative Clyne work with some evocative open harmonies, and concluded with a thoroughly robust rendering of the Ravel orchestration of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, in which the tuba struggled a little in “Bydlo, “ but there were otherwise no problems. The orchestra has newly acquired a custom-made bell, and this clanged out like nothing you’ve heard before in the grand conclusion.

But the highlight of this concert came in between: the Bruch Violin Concerto, and it wasn’t the highlight just because the estimable Gil Shaham was soloist. I just heard this concerto last month from San Francisco, and the soloist was smooth-toned but rather characterless, while the orchestra was even bland and dull. Not this time. Here we heard why this is one of the most popular concertos in the repertoire. The orchestra was as burstingly robust as they would be in Pictures, and Shaham, though I’ve heard him perform wonders before, was simply amazing, a standing rebuke to plainer soloists. Every note had character, and his mostly high and dry tone varied tremendously, including some of the tenderest soft passages that could still be heard over the orchestra. Thrilling.

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Best of '25: Icon Voting

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This post contains polls for

picnicnic,

reeby10, &

sheliak

( Let's vote! )

Current Music: Rose Betts, "Running"

If I'm hoping, then I'm hoping for the frost

I am feeling non-stop terrible. I took a couple of pictures in the snow-fallen sunshine this afternoon.

( And be the roots that make the tree. )

spatch sent me a 1957 study of walking directions to Scollay Square. Researcher's notes can be unnecessarily period-typical, but the respondents themselves are wonderful. "You're a regular question-box, aren't you?" It turns out to be part of the basis for a seminal work of urban planning and perception. I like the first draft of the public image of Boston, including its conclusion that it is a deficit to the city not to be thought of as defined by the harbor as much as the river.

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Movies: The Housemaid, Iron Lung, Whistle

The Housemaid (2025). A recently released felon (Sidney Sweeney), takes a job as a housemaid in hopes of stabilizing her life, but lady of the house Nina (Amanda Seyfried) is abusive and unstable, and things escalate.

This is once again Paul Feig directing a dumb enjoyable trashy thriller about woman, following the Simple Favor movies with Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively. Glad you found your niche, dude! Keep it up! I think parts of this might be even dumber than A Simple Favor, and it didn't matter at all. The plotholes are gaping, and we do not care, because we are here for women who Survive and ultimately Fuck Shit Up, and that is what we get.

Also like A Simple Favor, there's a husband, although at least here he's plot-relevant.

( spoilers for that )

In addition to being dumb as fuck (affectionate?), I will say this movie would have been better if maybe 20 mins of it had been cut. The middle kind of dragged.

Interestingly, this was a slow burn success at the box office; I think it's up to about $335M worldwide, which is huge for a little thriller like this. I foresee a sequel in our future, and honestly I'm here for it.

--

Iron Lung (2026). An adaptation of an indie video game, this is about a convict sent below an ocean of blood in a tiny submarine to look for... stuff.

This movie was self-funded, directed, and edited by Youtuber Markiplier, who stars. For all that, it's a pretty credible first effort. There's a lot of great atmosphere, and things go full Sam Raimi in the end in a way I enjoyed.

OTOH, I felt it really struggled with pacing and flow of information. Sometimes I had to infer key facts (like "what is his objective through the entire middle of the film") from stuff said way after the fact. Even worse, nearly all the exposition is delivered via distorted radio, and it was very frustrating to have the sense there was important stuff that I wanted to know that I straight up couldn't hear properly. There's also just too much plot and backstory and lore here for a movie with this little dialogue. The video game is barely an hour and has no characters; we don't need most of this!

Fellow youtuber hbomberguy (of the James Somerton plagiarism video fame) posted quite a long letterboxd review and made some points I appreciated, especially that Markiplier probably feels a certain personal connection to the idea of sitting in a small room trying to do an ill-defined job while unsure of one's purpose. Overall, though, my feelings align more closely with my charts guy Dan Murrell's take.

Anyway, I hope this movie is a gateway to more people discovering indie horror films. There's so much stuff out there, and a lot of it's good and weird and trying new things, like this is.

--

Whistle (2026). Some teens, including newcomer Chris (Dafne Keene) and future doctor Ellie (Sophie Nelisse) blow an ancient death whistle that causes their fated deaths to happen early, one by one.

That description does not make it sound like a good movie, and in fact it isn't, but it was trying harder than these kinds of dumb supernatural slashers often are. The cast is all very charming; I have a huge crush on Nelisse, it was great to see Keene again, now all grown up (she was Laura Kinney in Logan), and honestly all the main teens are likable, even the obligatory asshole jock. Nick Frost and Michelle Fairley are also here! Frost in particular is very fun and I wanted more of him.

There are various notes (Chris's past drug use, cousin Rel's nerdy comics obsession) that clearly were trying to add up to something. With several more rounds of script edits, this could have been this year's Clown in a Cornfield: a surprisingly charming teen slasher, greater than the sum of its parts, and with a sweet queer romance. For the first forty minutes or so, I had real hope! The setup was good!

Unfortunately this movie didn't get those edits, so it sort of tries to say something about dying and living, but also people's "deaths" are disfigured versions of themselves gleefully chasing them to ground like cats playing with their food. The cousin feels like three different characters in a trench coat. There's a time paradox thing going on with Chris's future death that just confuses the issue. It does have a queer romance, and you could argue that seeing Keene and Nelisse finally kiss is worth the price of admission, but I found it underbaked. There's also a drug dealing youth pastor with a switch blade for some reason.

Unlikely as it is with a premise this dumb, this could and should have been better.

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Six Sentence Sunday

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Current Mood: tired

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🔊 Daily music

Watch on YouTube

@ Spotify

I could play the doctor, I can cure your disease
If you were a sinner, I could make you believe
Lay you down like one, two, three
Eyes roll back in ecstasy
I can smell your sickness, I can cure your (Cure)
Cure your disease🎵
Lady Gaga - Disease

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music,
music monday

Music Monday

🎵 Ashley Blair, “what have i been up to“

Multifandom: Unsent Letters - An Epistolary Exchange

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finish line,
wwm

Finish Line February 8!

FINISH LINE

YOU MADE IT!

I hope your weekend treated you well, but even if it didn’t, we’re here to celebrate your marathon achievements!

Please reply with your numbers for the weekend–word count, number of pages edited, outlining work–whatever you accomplished. Include what you feel should be included, but please remember that we love numbers almost as much as words.

Thank you for writing with us this weekend!

Football

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Daily Happiness

1. Our hotel tickets are all sorted! We're going to be staying at three different hotels this time as opposed to just one last time, so that will be interesting. Originally I had wanted to just make it two, one in Tokyo and one in Osaka, but the hotel near Universal Studios Japan only has a hotel shuttle earlier in the day and there's only two flights daily from LA to Osaka, both of which arrive later in the evening, after the shuttle stops running. So the options are take a taxi (expensive and not what I want to spend our money on) or the train, which requires multiple transfers and is not ideal after a twelve hour flight. The shuttle does run to the area around Osaka station all night, so since we're only planning to go to Universal Studios two of the four days we'll be in Osaka, we decided to get a hotel in the city for a couple days then switch to one closer to Universal Studios for the time we'll be at the park. For the Tokyo leg of the trip, even though we won't be doing Disneyland every day, we did opt to get a hotel near the parks and just stay there the whole time, even the days we go into the city, because our Disneyland days will be spread out.

2. We got Popeye's for lunch today. We both really like their chicken, but there's none around here. In fact, for some reason we have no fast food chicken options nearby except Chick-fil-A, which we refuse to eat at. But we happened to be near Popeye's, so we took the opportunity.

3. I took a longer than usual walk this morning and stopped at the fancy donut place. They have a couple new Valentine's donuts and I got a strawberry chocolate malasada, which had a chocolate coating and was filled with like strawberry pudding. It was super tasty.

4. Tuxie!

Entry tags:

culture

💩🔪

Can you freeze your poop and hone it into a working knife? Science says no.

Also ref. the absolutely horrifying line of, “the knife-edge still quickly melted and deteriorated.” No thank you!!!

Book 13, 2026

Shifting and Shenanigans (Magical Mystery Book Club, #1)

Shifting and Shenanigans by Elizabeth Pantley

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

View all my reviews

Finally finished my latest book, which was Shifting and Shenanigans by Elizabeth Pantley. It’s the first in the “Magical Mystery Book Club” series. The main characters are pragmatic Paige and her impetuous Aunt Glo.

Paige and Glo inherit a lovely old inn from Paige’s grandmother, GeeGee. Paige is still finding her footing after a divorce, and Glo is always up for an adventure. As they explore their new digs, they find the key that unlocks the basement, where GeeGee never allowed them to go. Paige and Glo find a fantastic library, along with Frank, the talking cat who guards it. From Frank, they learn they are meant to establish a book club and meet in the library. Paige and Glo end up recruiting a diverse group, and as they are attempting to select which book to read first, they are inadvertently sucked into the narrative. Frank tells them they are in the book until the mystery is solved. Everyone gets into the spirit, and they soon apply their various talents to interviewing suspects, searching for clues, and working together to solve the mystery.

Cute story with a fun premise. There was a touch of romance and a paranormal element (in addition to the talking cat!), and I enjoyed meeting all the quirky characters. I did find the plot to be meandering at times.

Favorite lines:
♦ “Pfft. It’s like you’ve never heard a talking cat before.”
♦ I was a bit concerned that our “experts” were a talking cat and a wildly uninhibited octogenarian.
♦ “Not sure what all the hiding behind trees is going to do for you. There’s like eighteen of you clowns.”

Lite and lively, four stars

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February Updates

Hallo, hope everyone's been well! January was a rough year, but at least February's proving to be a shorter one.

Like usual, I fall off of Dreamwidth about midway through January for whatever reason and then come and go like a hummingbird too jacked-up on sugar-water to remember where its roost went.

I have been resolving for months to do the

weekendwritingmarathon weekend challenge (to do it every weekend, in fact!) but I keep being extremely burnt out by Saturday, and then use Sunday to get all my chores done, and then suddenly Capitalism has shoved me back into its little hamster wheel and off I go again for another week! I've been also documenting my travels with ADHD for the last three quarters of a year, and there's a very specific and hefty amount of that which blocks my ability to focus, both on creative habits and self-care. So it's been pretty rough.

However, I managed to wangle myself back into my WIP's doc for

everwood ficlets and

rainbowfic prompts, and managed to tidy up two shorts which are now up on both communities.

The first, Creature Comforts, follows a short blurb about the dryad Daphne and the lumberjack Boyce, from Daphne's point of view. (I love writing from her perspective because Boyce is not a small man, but she is just as big as he is and probably is twice as strong. It's fun trying to get into the heads of the POV characters as I go through each of these ficlets!)

The second, Blood Siblings, was posted nearly a year ago in Everwood, but I hadn't popped it over onto Rainbowfic yet. It's about Brandili's misuse by her political-marriage, her escape from that, and her burning desire for revenge when she realizes that her husband knew of her hiding place all along and had in fact been allowing her to think she'd escaped him. If everything else lines up, I'm looking forward to when she can slice him up with her badass old pirate's sword or have her real beau shoot him through the heart with a cursed arrow. Forgiveness for past wrongs? Nahhhh.

Everwood is composed of many characters over about a decade or so and it's got a sort of ensemble, episodic bent to it, but I do have an overarching plot and message that I'm trying to weave through it all: Found family and found community are stronger in their day-to-day moments than the unceasing sprawl of colonization... and working through the everyday poison of the effects of colonization can in fact be what makes those bonds stronger. It's meant to be hopeful, in the end. Every one of the characters in this story are weird in some way and a lot of them are on the ropes. There's something about writing them recovering from all the blows they've taken that makes me a little happier.

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Helix Pendants

These pendants were designed for an earring set, but I liked the way the colors looked different depending on how they were turned.

( Read more... )

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第五年第三十天

部首
手 parts 10-15
抚, to comfort; 抛, to throw; 抢, to snatch; 护, to protect; 报, to report; 抬, to raise; 抱, to hug; 抽, to pull out; 担, to take responsibility; 拆, to tear open; 拇, thumb; 拉, to pull; 抛, to cast away; 拌, to mix; 拍, to pat/to photograph/racket; 拐, to turn a corner; 拒, to refuse; 拔, to pull out
( pinyin )
https://www.mdbg.net/chinese/dictionary?cdqrad=64

语法
2.22 (part 2) Frequency complements: 次, 趟, 遍, etc.
2.23 Directional complements 上，下，出，进，回，过
https://www.digmandarin.com/hsk-2-grammar
3.1 应该
https://www.digmandarin.com/hsk-3-grammar

词汇
传统, tradition; 流传, to spread; 遗传, inheritance
窗户, 窗子, window; 窗台, windowsill
春季, spring; 青春, youth
纯, pure; 纯净水, pure water; 单纯, simple
词汇, vocabulary
此, this; 此外, in addition; 从此, from then on
( pinyin )
https://mandarinbean.com/new-hsk-4-word-list/

玩玩
Since this week was 立春: Chen Jingfei sings 春色悠悠不及你荡漾; Zhou Shen sings 春雪.

昨天我们这边下雪了…不过没有积雪。大家过得还好吗？好好保重啊。

pred_recdec: Predicated LL / recursive descent parser / grammar interpreter in Rust.

Posted by Tony Finch

https://github.com/wareya/pred_recdec

https://dotat.at/:/E3YHH.html

2026‑02‑08 - pred_recdec: Predicated LL / recursive descent parser / grammar interpreter in Rust.

https://github.com/wareya/pred_recdec

redirect https://dotat.at/:/E3YHH

blurb https://dotat.at/:/E3YHH.html

atom entry https://dotat.at/:/E3YHH.atom

web.archive.org archive.today

https://github.com/wareya/pred_recdec

https://dotat.at/:/E3YHH.html

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GenPrompt Bingo: Wild Card (Telepathy)

AO3 Link | Long Distance Force Calls (842 words) by Merfilly
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Star Wars: Rebels
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Darth Vader & Ahsoka Tano
Characters: Darth Vader, Ahsoka Tano
Additional Tags: Telepathy, Force Bond
Summary:

They never severed the bond...

Long Distance Force Calls

The first time her meditations took her deep enough that the lock slipped from the training bond, Ahsoka almost metaphorically ran away and slammed the gate shut. She was still on the run, still trying to figure out where she could belong that would make a difference, and there was this swirling storm of rage and pain.

Before she could, he took notice of her, and for a moment, she felt him push the anger away to hold on to her as something of his own.

~You left me.~ The accusation burned blue-white in her mind, as the anger rose higher than the possessive love.

~I would be dead if I hadn't and you know it,~ she shot back, but there was a piece of her that did feel the guilt of the galaxy burning down because of her choice.

~I could have protected you!~

~Really, Skyguy?~ She deliberately let him see as she stood looking over the markers made for the 332nd.

It was him that closed her out … after she tasted his own sense of failure to those that had trusted them both.

She had not been meditating that deeply when she knew that he was touching her mind. The whirls of anger were almost steadying, given how enraged she'd been by the Alliance ignoring her advice. They would not do so again — but too many had paid the price.

She locked that, all of her other activities, deep inside, protecting them behind shields he could not penetrate. That the anger was tied so deeply to pain, unending pain, was a moment's curiosity before she acknowledged him in her mind.

~Snooping on me, Skyguy?~

~Your irreverence only grows,~ and the voice was far more resonant, deeper, carrying a darker flare than ever, but she thought there was something desperate in how it sounded.

~Did they all die?~

She hissed in a breath, needing to protect those few men she knew to be free of the Empire, the ones safe from the nightmare… and grieving for all those she had not been able to save.

~If, Apprentice, you should find others, they still age.~

Her hesitation to tell him made those words come across as cold as space, and yet, even as he left her alone in her mind, she noted he had told her the important part. Somewhere, deep inside the man that had become her worst nightmare, he still cared about the men. And she would see what she could do to fix it, another testament of who they had been, when they had been together, protecting the men.

She was injured, almost to the point of needing trance to hold it at bay until her operatives made the pick up.

She didn't want to risk being that vulnerable, even as she reached for the fury-laced-with-pain that smoldered in the corner of her psyche.

~You are hurt.~

The surprise, followed by almost overwhelming anger directed at whatever had harmed her was almost touching, but Ahsoka had to keep that away from her heart. She brought her irreverence to her own defense.

~You are always in pain, Skyguy. Surprised your handler didn't get that fixed.~

That was better, a sharp spike in the anger, the deeper presence of darkness — it helped her maintain the illusion that they could never be anything but enemies now, even as neither of them severed their bond.

~There was not much of me to heal,~ being the next honest thought set Ahsoka back on her proverbial heels.

~Ultimate power, with access to a master cloning world, and he couldn't get you body parts cloned? Organs? Whatever it is that you need to not be… like this? Skyguy, your contract with this guy is worse than mucking eopi stalls.~

She didn't expect him to hold onto the link after that.

~Perhaps. But there is no alternative.~

Those words, contemplative, almost calm, sent a chill down Ahsoka's spine, but before she could think her way to a witty comeback, he locked her out again.

~There have been a number of times I thought you were a figment of my imagination.~

That calm entry into her mind, backdropped against the abyss of ever-present pain, set Ahsoka on edge. They'd been entirely too close in physical space this day.

~I wish I had words to convince you that we could make a better reality than what we have.~

She kept it to a surface emotion of wishfulness, holding back every other emotion that had surged in her soul during the near encounter.

~Wishes have never been a good plan of attack, Apprentice.~

She closed her eyes, gave him her regrets for the past, and locked him out of her mind, shoring up her shields against the man she missed, that still existed in a monster that had destroyed everything resembling peace.

Here they were, face to face…

…and even all the moments of the years apart that had led to words and emotions shared, they both knew.

Today, what they had been would either be destroyed forever —

— or reforged.

Current Mood: accomplished

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Day 6 - fic - Hazbin Hotel, Charlie Morningstar

Title: The Ache for Home

fandom: Hazbin Hotel

Characters/Pairings Charlie Morningstar/Vaggi, Angel Dust

Summary: When neither Husk nor Cherri could make any headway with Angel in terms of bringing him home, Charlie decides to take her chances and try to show him how much he’s missed.

Rating: teen

warnings : angst, mental health issues, drug/alcohol abuse, mentions of sex work

Find the story here on AO3.

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The Rose in the Abyss and Salieri and Mozart: Two Reviews

I've been meaning to write proper reviews for both these novels since literally last year, but as I've been unable to find the time, headspace of energy (due to having had to work 6 to 6.5 days per week since the start of January and still counting, thanks capitalism), short, impressions-based ones will have to do.

( The Rose in the Abyss )

( Salieri and Mozart )

I read the Chinese originals of both novels here and here on JJWXC. For Salieri and Mozart, I also read a print-exclusive extra from the mainland Chinese print edition of the novel.